i'm writing a book

shortly after turning twenty-five, i fell out of a hammock. yes, you read that right. at twenty-five, i experienced what most people likely experience at that age. a quarter-life crisis. an existential crisis. not really feeling like my life was going anywhere, or worse, going in a direction i wasn’t sure i wanted. it was almost as if i couldn’t run away any longer from the lingering question “what do you want?” and this heavy sort of feeling constantly reminding me, that continuing to climb a corporate ladder that felt soul sucking was not what i wanted. yet i did it anyways.

so i signed up for yoga teacher training while starting my new job in marketing. and only a short few months later after graduating from teaching training and beginning to feel the toll of working a job that drained the life from me, i found myself falling out of a hammock. on a sunny afternoon, in a park a few blocks away from my apartment. after my head taking a hit on the ground, i knew right then and there, i had a concussion.

there are things we spend our entire lives not knowing. life is a bit of a mystery like that. like, what happens after we die? what is the meaning of awful things happening to others or to the world? or if someone is truly saying what they mean? or what would life have been like had we grown up in a different place or in a different time? and then there are things we just know without any sort of explanation. there are things we cannot deny to be true, even if they don’t always make sense. and this was one of them. i was never trying to wish anything ill or harmful upon myself, but sometimes, when you know, you know. and in this moment, i just knew.

i carefully sat myself up on the grass and focused on taking ten slow breaths. i remember thinking stay here, stay awake, breathe. and i remember feeling my feet in the grass and then counting five things i could see, four things i could hear, three things i could touch or smell, and i thought, i just need five minutes to make it home. that is all i need. so i carefully gathered my items and very slowly, very gratefully, made my way home. as the next days were a blur of headaches, nausea, dizziness, i landed somewhere in between feeling existential asking to the universe why is this happening?! yet worried for my health and feeling grateful that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. then i eventually found myself in a doctors office watching the practitioner sign a note insisting i take medical leave from my job, from practicing yoga, and pausing life as i knew it.

later that july afternoon i sat outside on the front porch watching the rainfall. it was dark and gloomy, yet somehow peaceful. tears began to stream down my cheek because something in me knew. something in me knew everything was about to change. something in me knew the moment i told my company i was taking a leave for my injury, i knew i wouldn’t be going back. it wasn’t something i could make logical sense of. but it was something i just knew. i just had a feeling. something in me continued to say, this job is over. you are not going to go back. i couldn’t explain it, but i just knew. i like to think that this was all a moment of divine intervention. and lately i seem to think that’s perhaps what it was.

sometimes, when life happens, specifically when these sorts of things happen, it can feel like why is this happening? because everything seemed to be great. but then, i began to wonder, was it really all that great? was i actually happy? because the truth was, i felt burnt out. i felt exhausted. i couldn’t remember the last time i truly gave myself a break. i wasn’t sure what i wanted or where i wanted to go. i knew i loved yoga, but it felt as if i didn’t know much about anything else. without using screens, without driving, or having much of a social life over the next months, slowly but surely i found myself curled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a journal for most of the following months to come. it was as if i was given this space to heal, to process. to rethink my priorities. to realize our health is fragile. and a gift. and we can choose what we want to do with our lives while we are living and able. yet as time went on, i began to realize how much fear i had bubbling up from the inside.

i had fear that i was on the wrong path. fear that i would never be brave enough to change course. fear that i would never do the things that i had always dreamed of. fear that i would be stuck in my marketing job forever. and fear that one day i would have to face that reality. because that would mean i’d have to change it. fear that my creative endeavors were just silly little ideas and that they would never go anywhere. fear of what others would think if i choose to pursue said silly little ideas. fear that i would always live my life doing what i should do and that i would never actually figure out what i wanted. i didn’t realize that i was so full of fear. it was almost as if i began to wonder, when did i become so afraid?

because i remember the little girl in me, who would write until she couldn’t hold the pencil anymore. who would create storylines and turn them into poetry that could have been the worst ever written, but i never cared. because i loved it. and when did that spark, that passion, turn into crippling anxiety that kept me small and hidden from the world? when did i allow that to happen?

over the next few months, with careful decision after careful decision, it was as if i finally began to understand how to listen to how i truly felt. i knew i didn’t want this job no matter how good it looked on paper. i knew i wanted a chance to start over. to change course. i knew i wanted to be creative again. i knew that i was writing again. and that i was writing poems again. i was writing about thoughts and feelings i didn’t even know i had. it all came pouring out of me, flowing in a way i hadn’t quite experienced since i was seven years old.

that period of my life was very uncertain, very unknown, because choosing yourself rather than going back to something that seems safe on the outside, means facing the unknown. it means entering the void between what once was and will be. it is disorienting. because my identity was wrapped up into a sales and marketing title and without that, who really was i? who are you when everything is stripped away, or in this case, without yoga, without my marketing career? i wasn’t sure and honestly, i am still not fully sure. but when life happens, when injuries happen, you can’t seem to notice anything else except what truly matters. your health, your joy, your happiness, and your well-being. and i will spend the rest of my life prioritizing just that.

two years later, this beautiful, chaotic, challenging, turbulent, heartbreaking and loving chapter of mine is being published into my very first poetry book. a book about the unknown. and fearing what comes next. spiraling about the fear you feel. not knowing if you are strong enough to choose yourself or choose what feels familiar. they are experiences that perhaps we all have to some degree, but isn’t always talked about openly. because a lot of the time, these moments feel like the rock bottom, the moments we feel ashamed about, or the moments when everything falls apart, when everything crumbles, and nothing new has been built yet. asking the question: when did i become so afraid?

this book feels exactly like what i have been working towards my entire life yet was never sure how or when i would get there. it has already been such a transformative journey in ways i expected, in ways i did not expect and in ways that i know will stick with me forever. i am still on this journey of creating what comes next, even two years later after the injury. i am starting to believe perhaps a part of us is always existing in the in-between.

the summer of twenty-twenty four will always be remembered as a very special time for me, because even in the midst of my life uprooting, even in the midst of making changes that made me deeply, deeply, uncomfortable and scared, even when i was questioning what was next or asking myself what i wanted to do next, it was a time where i reconnected to the part of me that i hadn’t seen for awhile. the writer. the artist. the creative. the part of me that was always there, the part of me that i always knew would make itself known again, found its way to the forefront of my life. and throughout all of the turbulence, if there is anything i feel grateful for, it is that this challenging time, brought me back to myself.

life is consistently going to be giving us situations where we will never truly know the answers. and there are going to always be things that we just know. and if you do anything, follow what you just know. i will never know if my injury was divine intervention, redirection, or what the true grander purpose behind it all truly was, but what i do know is that everything happens for a reason. if we are in the unknown, perhaps it is up to us what we make of it. we can spend it in fear, we can spend it creating something new. we can spend it processing, healing, or grounding into the magic of it all. maybe it is a bit of everything. and maybe that is the whole point.

when did i become so afraid?